User blog:Jgjake2/Site Enhancements and Scripting
As some of you may know, my main contributions were/are more technical than anything. I created many of the original templates on the wiki and, after becoming an admin, I created a lot of the JS. Moving forward with the wiki's development, I've written a few new scripts and have even more planned to make us really stand out. TabView Edit Buttons In my last blog post, we came to a consensus that tabs would be an effective way to differentiate between various DI games. However, after looking into the TabView extension I found several major issues with its implementation (To read my full explanation, go to Help:Tab_view). Long story short, it breaks the wiki when viewed on a mobile device, and it is difficult for users unfamiliar with how wikis work to edit the linked content. So I wrote a script to address these issues. The result can be seen here, in contrast to the tabs on the TabView Help Page. However, there is one bug that I've noticed with multiple rows of tabs thanks to User:DarienLeonhart Thread:19965. It's minor but I will have a fix for it soon. I will have several more features for this script, like adding icon customization so you can add game logos. Maps 2.0 My original maps template is an absolute masterpiece considering it is 100% wiki syntax! No javascript required!! It just pulls the information from the necessary page and displays it when you hover on an icon. After becoming an admin, I made the maps for Skyrim. When clicked, every icon opens a popup that shows the entire linked page. It became very popular and was ranked #1 on google for years (now it's #3 :( ). And tons of other wikis have adopted it for their own needs. The idea of collaborative map making is fantastic! Anyone can jump in and modify it! That's why I chose to do it in the first place. Which is probably why wikia decided to create their own maps extension. And boy did they take the limp-dick approach. It looks sexy and is very smooth, I will give it that. But it doesn't take advantage of the power a wiki has, like mother-effing Transclusion! A lot of users have voiced their concerns about this, including one of the admins I competed against at SXSW for Wikia's Qwizards. One of the biggest reasons I made our maps pull from another page was to reduce the amount inconsistent information across the wiki. So only a single page (like a collectable's location) has to be updated, and the result can be seen across the wiki (like on a map page with a location popup). When I originally wrote the Skyrim map script, I had no idea how to use javascript. But since then I have come along and I've become very well acquainted with it (jMod myUserJS) So I think I can do better than Wikia. Also, to help users that don't know how wiki templates works, I recently found out how to hack the visual editor to support custom templates with custom javascript. So I could make editing a map as simple as dropping a pin and filling out some text boxes (like wikia's extension). wikiMod.js I recently created a Wikia-specific Javascript library. It's designed for both Wikia's main and mobile sites, and loads lightning fast. It's got a crap ton of features that are designed to work with/without jQuery and any of Wikia's core libraries (which aren't loaded. see below). It also has full cross-browser support (even better than most of wikia's JS) and can run in a privileged window (like greasemonkey) without causing permission errors. If you are a programmer and would like to assist me with any of my projects, I will be using this library to ensure there is a consistent experience for all out users. You may or may not have noticed I made some edits to MediaWiki:Mobile-full-site. This is because Wikia doesn't load most of its javascript on mobile devices (that includes the Common.js). So in order to ass JS to fix some major problems on the mobile wiki (see "TabView Edit Buttons") I added an injector hack that loads wikiMod and MobileDeviceJSLoader. (Note, the loader is a little sloppy and I plan on rewriting it soon). I have a lot I want to do before DI2, but this is a good start. Comments? Concerns? Opinions? Tacos? 02:15, March 21, 2015 (UTC) Category:News Category:Blog posts